


A Drink of that Promise Land

by MellytheHun



Series: Quiet Now, You're Gonna Wake the Beast [1]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Apocalypse, BAMF Beverly Marsh, BAMF Eddie Kaspbrak, Bisexual Disaster Richie Tozier, Dark Tower References, Friendship, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gen, Gift Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Monsters, Pre-Slash, Protective Richie Tozier, Protectiveness, Stanley Uris Lives, Trust, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, i'll fix this later, it's almost 3am yall, so much i'm probably not thinking of rn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22691401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MellytheHun/pseuds/MellytheHun
Summary: A month after the collapse of Neibolt, and the reunion of the Losers to kill It, absolutely nothing is as it should be.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Quiet Now, You're Gonna Wake the Beast [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632262
Comments: 21
Kudos: 92





	A Drink of that Promise Land

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for several artists on Twitter who have been bouncing around ideas about this particular AU - the AU they created is more a strictly-zombie apocalypse, but because I love the Dark Tower series, I couldn't help crossing it over. There's so much overlap between the Dark Tower series and all of Stephen King's other works, I haD TO USE MORE MONSTERS
> 
> In any case, this is one ficlet for this particular universe, I'm sure I'll write more for it as inspiration strikes, but this is all inspired by and written for; png, bonesbubs, and Evvy and I'm positive there are more artists attached to this AU, so I may edit this note in the future, but those are the people I know to tag lmao
> 
> Anywayyyy
> 
> Here you go ~

Night is falling fast, the air is getting cool, and though Richie has made objections that they should stop and make camp instead of pursuing what could, quite literally, be a dead end, Beverly clings onto hope.

“This is good,” Beverly states optimistically, using her blood-crusted hatchet as a walking stick, moving steadily up, “This mountain is too steep for those fuckers to get up here. It’s gonna be safe.”

“I’m still checking the house,” Richie insists, unthinkingly extending his hand to help Eddie step over a fallen tree while he stares at Beverly’s back, “We haven’t seen people for ages. If they cleared out, there’s gotta be a reason.”

Richie has proven to be an efficient, brave, and quick scout for potential camping sites, and so volunteering to clear the house by himself is not entirely unexpected. 

Occasionally, Beverly will be the one to do a full check, but Richie outright denies Eddie his turns, and while Beverly is good at the work, Richie moves faster, unafraid to throw doors open, or venture into dark corners. 

They all decided, as a team, early on, that it was simply smarter for two of them to stick together, and stay in one place, while one of them scouted the area for potential monsters.

Singularly, Richie doesn’t have to keep checking on the others, and he can easily keep his back to a wall, and swing his bat wildly in all directions without need for concern. If the worst comes to pass, Richie can also make a run for it without worrying about Eddie or Beverly needing his help, and all the while, he can shout to them to run, or hide, or prepare for his incoming - it makes the checks fast, and simple, but it does regularly cause Eddie and Beverly prolonged, intense anxiety.

“ _I’ll_ check,” Beverly tells him, “ _You’re_ going to help Eddie.”

“Help me?”

“Help him?” Richie asks in unison with Eddie, “What does he need my fuckin’ help for?”

“Because he’s hurt, Richie, and we should move in pairs when we can,” Beverly explains, “It’s better that both of you get cleaner faster, and then, once you are clean, and you’ve dressed Eddie’s cut, I can bathe.”

“I can handle it on my own -” Eddie begins, nearly falling when ground gives way beneath him.

“We’ll move faster if you both just bathe first. Stop arguing with me - was I not right about the convenience store?”

They both groan, “yeah.”

“Was I not also correct about U.S-two-West?”

“Yes, Bev.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Was I not _also_ correct about the Post Office?”

“Yes, we get it -”

“Bev, understood, but still -”

“Butts are for pooping, Richie,” Beverly retorts with a smirk casually thrown over her shoulder, “Really. When we get up to this house, we’ll check the outside, we’ll take the inside slow, and we’ll check for a generator - once we get water ready, in any way, I am instructing that you stay with Eddie, and you’re listening to me, because my plans work.”

Sighing deeply, Richie concedes, and mumbles to Eddie, "you guys are so bossy."

"I don't see why you're implicating me in this."

"You are the bossiest person in the world, Eds, what are you even -"

"I am not!"

"You so are!"

"Fuck you, Richie, I'm perfectly polite."

"Cool, cool, right - have you met you before?"

"Richie, I swear to God -"

"Boys!" Beverly admonishes, though there's an apparent smile in her voice.

There's silence for a moment, and then -

"Great work, dipshit, now you got us in trouble," Eddie says to Richie's back.

" _Me_!? I -"

"If any monsters pop out because you two are bickering, as God as my witness, I will let them eat you both."

Richie snorts a laugh, Eddie shoves him in the back, and they make the rest of their trek in silence, broken only by soft ‘thank you’s,’ and ‘no problem’s,’ that Richie and Eddie trade, as Richie helps Eddie up the mountainside.

The woods blanketing the mountainside make the climb difficult, particularly on Beverly’s swollen ankle, and Eddie, who has found himself considerably more dehydrated than Richie and Beverly.

Once they make it to the house, they move as a triad, all backs to the center of the moving group, or otherwise to walls. The woods are quiet, full of watchful birds, and some small wildlife, but nothing comes out at them, or dares to even step out of the line of trees.

There are no cars in the driveway, and Eddie notes that no mail is in the mailbox at the end of it, “must be a vacation home,” Eddie notes, “I did some investment risk analysis for personal investments like vacation homes, earlier in my career. It’s in a place that’s hard to reach by foot, and you’d need four-wheel drive to get up here in a car, meaning it’s isolated. They clearly liked their privacy, and with no mail, it means even solicitors don’t know about the address. It could have a generator - it’s what I’d advise to anyone buying a location like this.”

Scoping out the house is uncomplicated affair, and after stepping inside, Beverly immediately relaxes.

“Oh my God, they’ve got a fireplace - this is perfect. Even if they don’t have running water, we can boil some.”

“I’m gonna check out the basement,” Richie tells them, spinning his bat in his hand, “I don’t want us all getting trampled in the stairwell. If I need help, I’ll give a shout.”

Begrudgingly, Beverly agrees, and Eddie and she watch Richie descend into the darkness.

After nearly a minute of silent waiting, Beverly says softly to Eddie, “I don’t like this. We should follow him -”

“Turn on a light!” Richie calls up.

Eddie flips the switch nearest to him, and to his awe, the lights in the kitchen, and living room spring to life.

He and Beverly beam at each other, and Richie turns on the light in the stairwell, down at the foot, and grins up at them, “guess who found a functioning generator, and water filter?”

“They have filtered well water?” Beverly asks disbelievingly, near tears.

“They do indeed, and I’ve got the whole house running right now. Go ahead and start a fire, just in case we lose the power - the water filter is a big fuckin’ chunk of metal down here, it’s probably sucking up a lot of power. I’m gonna make sure we’ve got clean water enough to fill the bath, and we’ll play the rest by ear.”

“Richie, I _love_ you,” Beverly celebrates, smiling broadly at him.

“I know it, babe,” he replies with a wink, stepping back up to the first floor, and then looking to Eddie says, “Wanna check out the master bathroom, see if we can fill that tub?”

“How did you see the generator?”

“Hm?”

“How did you - uhm - how did you see the generator? In the dark like that?”

Before looking back at Richie with unease, Beverly glances at Eddie, and then readjusts her hold on her hatchet.

Without meeting Eddie’s eyes, she can tell that he’s seeing something unusual about Richie. Enough to give him pause. And that’s certainly enough to give her even more.

They’ve run into doppelgangers already - the entirety of the East coast is running rampant with monsters not unlike Pennywise, although, they now know that Pennywise was likely a low-grade demon, in comparison to the ones they’ve met since.

The collapse on Neibolt created some kind of miniature singularity - instead of the ground meeting some end, it kept collapsing, until it was clear that there was no bottom, and soon the ground crackled, split, chased them out, and something akin to a sonic boom threw them all out in varying directions.

Beverly came to near the quarry, bloody, concussed, and only a few yards away from Eddie, who was clutched tightly in Richie’s hold; when the boom came, she would later learn that Richie wrapped his arms protectively around Eddie, tightly enough, apparently, that they went flying together.

Then came the first horde - dismembered teenagers, and children - even some adults - came out of the darkness of the sewage pipes, groaning, and reanimated. 

The last month has been an exercise in paranoia, doppelgangers the least of their troubles. 

At the top; they’ve yet to find Bill, Ben, Mike, or Stan, and everyday without seeing one of them causes the remaining three of them more distress. Though they seem to have lost the other Losers, at least for the time being, they have found other friends in the supernatural Wild West they’ve found themselves in.

After a full week of fighting for their lives, and searching high and low for the rest of the Losers, Eddie insisted they head Southwest - that he had to start venturing back towards his wife, to see if she was safe. 

To his credit, Richie didn’t make any jokes at Eddie’s expense, but he did wonder why Eddie would seek out his wife when the rest of their friends were still unfound; Eddie simply responded, ‘I made vows, Rich. I swore to protect her. I have to at least try to find her.’ After that, neither Beverly or Rich wanted Eddie to traverse the land alone, and so they left together.

They abandoned the cesspool of oddity that Derry had even more so become, and have since made it all the way to the border of Vermont (mostly) by foot (they did use US-2 W for some time on stolen gas, and an abandoned car, but it wasn’t long before they were overtaken by, as Richie described it, an ‘Old Testament Level,’ swarm of Crimson Tarantulas) 

Along the way, they met some Taheen - people with the heads of animals, as varied in motives and personalities as any normal human person, though as a rule, they seem uninterested in the goings-on of humans, thinking it beneath them. 

One of the Taheen that bothered with them, Mitsagg, helped them outrun a Tunnel Demon, and educated them on past interactions they’d not known how to quantify before.

Mitsagg has the head of a raven, feathered arms, and long, black claws; he gave them all his condolences on their world that “had moved on,” though he would not extrapolate on how, or why he knew that, or what he precisely meant by a world “moved on.”

Mitsagg did not revel in helping them, but he was not entirely unpleasant either - he seemed to admire Beverly above the others, and he really only actively disliked Richie, but that did not strike any of them as particularly surprising, as Richie’s _Animorphs_ jokes were low-hanging, and not at all flattering.

He warned them to stay away from the Sighe - faerie folk, tiny little things, “not more than four inches tall,” he’d told them, but he warned them that if they saw any clusters of Sighe, usually green in color, and incandescent, to veer away from them, as they like to distract humans to their demises. 

After hearing tell of what was happening in Derry, Mitsagg explained that they had “obviously,” been met by Suckerbats, and to beware of being bitten by them just as much as being bitten by the Undead - “for if you are bitten, you shall never wake again to the living world,” is all he said on the matter, though he also insinuated that there were other worlds to wake to. 

He explained away the Tunnel Demon, a monstrous, wormy blob of eyes, teeth, and tumorous arms, as “a nuisance,” that can be “easily destroyed with light - do not travel underground if it can be helped, though.” He warned them of Thinny as well, “a treacherous fog of inconceivable noise. It is an unpleasant sound, but will draw you nearer, and if you do follow those noises, you will not be seen again, though you may be heard as far as the Thinny travels,” and he warned too of Not-Men, “invisible most of the time - we are unsure of their capabilities, but they are dangerous criminals, capable of every evil your average humans are capable of. They can still die as ordinary men die, but I would advise you run, rather than try to fight to the death. They have the upperhand, and you are all very weak, as it stands.”

When they described Pennywise to him, Mitsagg said, “he must have been of the Uffi - this is an ancient term. Shapeshifters. Highly uncommon for your lands,” at which point Richie had asked if this was similar to doppelgangers, and explained to Mitsagg he had killed something imitating Stan, and that he knew it was false, because he knew Stan’s beauty mark was misplaced on his face, and this his nose was not quite right.

“Similar, yes,” Mitsagg had told Richie, “Related to the Uffi, but not the same. Can only imitate. Uffi can take any form they please, prey on memories to mimic personalities. I advise your comrades keep one another close, and take extra measures for personal security.”

They have.

The three of them have traded what information they need to, for this very event.

“What’s wrong?” Beverly asks quickly.

“His eyes,” Eddie answers.

Brown.

That’s not right.

“Is he down there?” Eddie asks unsteadily, a stolen flare gun loaded in his right hand, “Is Richie down there? Is he alive?”

“I _am_ Richie,” the demon lies, smiling nervously at them.

Beverly raises her arms, the hatchet arching high in the air, and Not Richie puts his arms up defensively, shying away from her, “stop! It’s me!”

It’s still Richie’s voice, and in its simplicity, in its familiarity, it is effective in stopping her from dropping her swing.

She looks to Eddie, unsure of what to do.

Shaking, Eddie points the flare gun at Not Richie’s face, and asks, “what did I whisper to you this morning?”

“What?”

“The fuck did I whisper to you this morning? We trade phrases and words every morning because of this - this sort of nutso-shit! So, what is it? What’s the thing I whispered to you this morning?”

Freezing up, the doppelganger is clearly caught, and tries to make a break for the door - Beverly throws her hatchet into it’s back as it flees, and Eddie nearly screams when the blade makes contact. No matter what they know, it _looks_ like Richie, it _sounds_ like Richie, and for all their brains are capable of comprehending, it still _feels_ like they’re _killing Richie_.

Beverly rushes over to the twitching body on the floor, puts one foot on its back, gets her grip around the handle of the hatchet, and when she struggles to pull the blade out of Not Richie’s spinal cord, she begins crying, aggravated, scared, and shouting, “stop looking like him! Stop it! You piece of shit! Stop looking like him!”

“I can’t - please - stop -”

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up! You’re not Richie!” she screams, pulling the hatchet free from its spine finally, she throws it down again, eliciting a horrible wail of pain, she throws the hatchet down a third time, and yells, “stop it! I know you’re full of shit! Did you kill him?! Is he okay!?” - she waits for an answer, but when none comes, in a bout of evident frustration, and terror, she separates the doppelganger’s neck from its shoulders in a single blow, splattering blood everywhere within a five foot radius.

The body remains the same, appearing as Richie.

Their sudden uncertainty is palpable.

What if Richie hadn’t remembered what Eddie had told him? What if he was anxious? What if he’d forgotten the protocol? What if he only ran because he knew if he didn’t put distance between Beverly and himself, she would kill him by mistake?

“Is it… did you -” Eddie doesn’t finish his question, afraid of the answer; instead, he turns back toward the basement door, and calls down, “Richie? Rich? You down there?”

No one calls back, somehow the light shining in the stairwell is worse than peering down in the blackness of before, and Eddie feels tears prickling his eyes, “Richie?” he calls again, “Richie!”

Unsure if Beverly will follow him, or even if she should, Eddie moves toward the stairs, keeps his back to the wall, and before he knows what he’s even preparing to do, or see, he finds himself at the foot, overlooking the basement.

Across the room, he sees the door to a closet open, and from how it sits ajar, he can see something like a boiler, or what must be the water filter inside.

Peering down from there, Eddie sees Richie’s shoes on the ground - it looks like he’s lying on the floor, the sight of his body blocked at that angle by a couch.

“He’s down here, Bev! Give me back-up!” Eddie calls, still trembling as he moves down the rest of the steps; Beverly is beside him in the same breath.

“Richie,” Eddie says gently, back-to-back with Beverly now, her hatchet raised in the air as they near Richie’s body, “Rich?”

There are red marks around Richie’s neck that Eddie brings Beverly’s attention to - she says knowingly, “looks like a chokehold. Check for his pulse, he might just be knocked out.”

Crouching down, Eddie feels at Richie’s jugular, and though it’s shallow, and slow, there is a pulse.

“He’s alive,” Eddie breathes out.

“Wake him up. Now,” Beverly urges, “The rest of the house isn’t cleared, and we’re on the lowest level with no exit. We need to get to the first floor, at least. We can’t stay down here.”

They all have backpacks with limited personal articles, and stuffed to the brim with survival items; Eddie, of course, carries all their medical supplies. He reaches into the side pouch of his pack, finds a miniature waterbottle (meant only for emergencies), stretches his sweater sleeve over his wrist and palm, and pours some water onto it. As gently as he can, he moves the wet cloth of his sleeve over Richie’s pallid face, and taps his cheek.

“Rich,” Eddie says plainly, “Wake up, Rich. Richie. We gotta get out of here. Come on. I can’t carry you - you gotta wake up, Rich.”

It's startling to Eddie, in that moment, how absolutely fucked they'd be if Richie were down and out for the count in any other scenario.

Neither of them could carry Richie. 

He's overcome with a sense of dread, and guilt, and fear, realizing in retrospect how many areas Richie has cleared for them, how much danger he's put himself in, probably realizing that if he got knocked down, there would be no helping him.

That same cloying, sickly terror that Eddie felt in It's lair takes hold of him again, and he wipes away beading sweat from his own forehead before patting Richie's face again with his clothed hand, and tapping his face gently, urging him to wake up.

Finally;

“Mm.”

Smiling, a tear rolling down his face, Eddie huffs out a sort of strangled, wet sigh and replies, “there we are - come on, Rich. You got this. Wake up.”

After a few more tries, Richie opens his eyes to Eddie, and rasps, “somethin’ in the closet. Watch out.”

Laughing bitterly, Eddie tells him, “I know, Rich. We killed it. We gotta get you upstairs now, though. Can you stand?”

It takes a lot of teamwork, but they manage to get Richie up off the floor, slung mostly over Eddie’s side, and they half-carry him up the stairs, and warn him not to look toward the front door, as his double is lying murdered by the entryway. 

“Cool. Head's up, I will almost definitely throw up as soon as I see it. How’d you know it wasn’t me?” Richie asks.

“Got the eyes wrong,” Eddie replies, face feeling hot for some reason, “You remember what I whispered to you this morning?”

“That you had a weird dream about a Taco Bus, which you hate because you don’t think they’re clean, but you enjoyed the dream, because you haven’t had a decent meal in a month?”

“Yeah,” Eddie smiles, breathing a sigh of relief, Richie’s heavy arm draped over his shoulders, “That’d be it.”

“Okay - so, fuck what I said earlier. We’re gonna clear the house _together_ ,” Beverly decides, “It’ll take longer, but it’s not like we’re on a schedule. Let’s just - let’s just get this done, so we can rest.”

They take their time checking the rest of the house as a team, cautious, and slow, but their efforts pay off; they find it otherwise free of monsters and demons, but it’s only once they’re completely positive about that, that Beverly puts the hatchet down, and hugs Richie with all of her remaining strength. 

She cries into the crook of his neck, and he holds her closely, rubbing a soothing line up and down her back, eventually welcoming Eddie in for a group-hug with his other arm. When he squeezes them both as tightly as he's able, Eddie groans in protest at his back cracking, and Beverly is able to laugh again.

Once they’ve settled down from the emotional upheaval of all that, they start a fire in the hearth, all together, and Beverly and Eddie push Not Richie’s remains out onto the front patio, and then drag it to the tree line; the rush back into the house, unhappy to have left Richie alone for even a minute, but they wanted to spare him the experience of dragging his own decapitated body out into the woods. 

Beverly insists on cleaning up the blood as best she can right then, too, as she fears it will smell soon, and call unwanted attention to them; Eddie and Richie help her, and then put a salt circle around the house. That decision is based off of some advice Mitsagg gave them, regarding lower level demons; Eddie suggests that if they decide to stay longer than a night, they can spend the next morning setting up bells, and tripwires, and whatever else they might need to secure the place. 

Once all that is addressed, the three of them occupy the master bathroom together, hip-checking each other, and bemoaning their filthy reflections.

Richie runs the water, and it’s brownish at first, but it soon clears up, and he looks thrilled to report that it’s even warm.

Once it’s running clear, Richie tastes it, to verify that he doesn’t detect any sulfur, and once he’s free of all shadows of doubts, he declares it clean enough to wash Eddie’s wounds with.

“The door stays open, okay?” Beverly tells them, “I want you two to wash up fast, I’ll stand by the door, but I’m not moving any further than ten feet - and as _soon_ as you’re done, run the shower for me, and you two will stand guard while I wash.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Richie salutes - she smiles, but rolls her eyes too, and steps outside into the hall, her back to the bathroom.

Looking uncharacteristically sheepish, Richie nudges his broken glasses further up his nose, and advises, “put your pack down, man. I’ll, uh - I’ll let you get in the tub first.”

“Alright,” Eddie replies easily enough, putting his pack on the floor, and peeling his clothes off as quickly as possible, “Now would be a good time to re-dress that slash Pennywise gave me too.”

“Yeah,” Richie mutters, stripping down to his underwear very slowly.

Looking at the broad length of Richie’s bare shoulders makes Eddie uncomfortably warm, so he decides to focus on how gross he feels instead - he climbs into the tub, dumps an inordinate amount of shampoo into his palm, and pours half the bottle of body wash onto a loofah to start scrubbing - the water gets murky very quickly, and he’d feel bad about it, if it didn’t feel so wonderful to clean himself up.

“God, I haven’t had a good bath in fucking ages, man.”

As Richie steps in, still clad in his underwear, though Eddie doesn’t fully understand why, something else catches his eye.

“What’s the scar?” Eddie wonders.

“Appendix,” Richie answers, clearing his throat as he reaches for the shampoo, and accepts the bubbly loofah, “I was supposed to go on a date with this woman Lauren McDole, and our first date, I legit forgot about, so -”

“How do you forget a date you ask for?”

“I didn’t,” Richie explains, “ _She_ asked _me_. I said yes, I don’t even know why, it was just reflexive, I guess - she asked me on a Wednesday, and by Saturday night, I’d totally forgotten about it. She was pissed. I felt bad, so I told her I’d make it up to her, but then a gig came up, and I had to cancel, and then our third raincheck date, my fucking mother called her to tell her I was in the hospital, because my appendix had burst.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” Richie laughs, eyes shut as bubbles take over every inch of his skin, “She didn’t believe it. She cursed at my mother over the phone, convinced it was some ‘other woman,’ and that I was trying to humiliate her.”

“Oh no,” Eddie laughs, covering his face in embarrassment for Richie, “Rich, you’re a disaster.”

“I know, I know,” Richie agrees, grinning lopsidedly, “Clearly the universe did not want us to date.”

“Clearly,” Eddie stresses, staring at Richie’s long, and visibly strong thighs.

“I set a towel out for you - pat your arm dry, don’t be rough with it, kay?”

“Oh,” Eddie utters, “Right - yeah.”

He steals the loofah back to wash over his entire body once more before leaving Richie in the now dirty bath water - he hears the showerhead turn on as soon as he pulls the curtain shut, though, and the drain begins working. 

Richie’s soaked, dark blue boxer briefs find their way onto the floor, too, so he must wash more thoroughly once Eddie gets out.

The shy behavior piques his intrigue, but he refuses to follow that particular thread of interest.

Nothing good can come of it.

He finds a bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and takes it as his own, though it’s easily made for someone more Richie’s size. There’s a sleeved nightgown hanging below it though, plaid, and embroidered with a Tweety bird on it - they’ll be lucky if it even reaches Richie’s knees.

He sets it out for Richie to change into, anyway, and smiles to himself as he pats his arm dry, leaving the wound looking fresh, and clear.

Someone Undead had given the gash to him a solid week before - for days, Beverly and Richie had watched him like hawks, waiting for signs of a change, or an infection. When nothing happened, they decided that the only thing left to do was to clean it properly next chance they got, and he finds now that he’s actually quite happy to have waited.

He opens the medicine cabinet, sees a stash of medicines and first aid kits all worth stealing, but what makes him most happy is finding an oversized bottle of extra strength Neosporin. 

After Eddie passes a clean towel to Richie, he climbs out of the shower with it wrapped precariously around his waist - more than that, though, is that he emerges from the steam a new man, looking pink, renewed, refreshed, and sort of troublingly charming with his hair swept back as it is.

He accepts the night gown as if accepting a dare at a slumber party, and Eddie grins at him stupidly the entire time he struggles to get his strong arms through the sleeves. It winds up fitting more like an oversized shirt than a proper sleeping garment, and when his shoulders break the stitching at the collar, they both laugh.

Once (basically) clothed, Richie calls out to Beverly, and she comes in, openly laughs at Richie in his ladies’ night gown, which he unironically adores, telling them both that he's going to fashion it into a shirt somehow, and they stand by as she gets into the shower, and delights in having actual soap to use, and warm, clean water still being pumped.

With Beverly in the shower, Richie takes all of their clothes into the hallway, where a washing machine, and its companion dryer, are embedded in the wall; he is able to turn the wash on, and says a prayer for their clothes as they go in for a hard wash with real detergent and softener. 

Upon his return, Richie finds sealed toothbrushes, still in their packaging, under the sink, and they all whoop, and applaud the find - Richie and Eddie go about unpacking the entire bathroom, finding gems in every direction, and eventually they medicate, and dress the wound to his side that he got from Pennywise, when he only barely escaped being impaled by It, and they dress his entire forearm with antibiotic cream, and gauze. 

Richie takes his time with that, smoothing his fore and middle finger over the gash on Eddie's forearm, rubbing the antibiotic cream in gentle circles, and occasionally glancing up from under his lashes to smile kindly at Eddie, though Eddie doesn't know what it means. He smiles back, anyway. (Richie's always been good at that - making him smile, even when he doesn't mean to) 

As Eddie watches Richie care after his wound, it takes a genuine, physical effort to not say, out loud, 'your hands are fucking enormous,' because Eddie is positive that if he does say it, Richie will have a field day with the comment, and it won't go unmentioned for the next thirty years.

So, he thinks it. Very privately. 

Once clean, and even relatively happy, Beverly steps out of the shower, makes the towel into a type of dress, and decides she’s happy to lounge in it until they find something more suitable. She walks over to watch Richie finish wrapping the beige gauze from the bend of Eddie's elbow to his wrist, and compliments how gentle he's being - they trade some kind of look that Eddie doesn't fully understand, and Richie grumbles a 'thank you,' to her that sounds a lot more like a 'fuck off,' but Beverly only smiles at Richie, so Eddie doesn't get it.

With time on their hands now, they go through the kitchen - the good stuff, like fruits, veggies, eggs - it’s all long expired. There are several bottles of good wine, though, gallons of bottled water, and good canned foods. 

Beverly finds an enormous bag of yellow rice, and, with the blessed power still on because of the generator, they decide to make it while they still can, and after a second group-trip to the basement, they find extra blankets, pillows, flashlights, candles, and a freezer with questionable meat, but very much still-frozen bags of peas and carrots, which they gladly mix in with the rice.

For the first time in a long time, they’re eating to their fill, sitting on a nest of cushions, and pillows in a living room, a fire keeping them warm, very good red wine keeping them warmer, and more clean water to drink than they know what to do with.

While their clothes go into the dryer, they all three find themselves rummaging in the guest rooms; Beverly finds tops she decides she’s taking, though she’s hoping her jeans survive the wash and dry, Richie finds some sweaters to take, and a pair of jeans that suit him nicely too, and Eddie finds a cache of sports goods, including better backpacks than what they have, intended for hikers, and camping. They even contemplate trying out the kayaks they find, but Beverly mentions that they barely understand what’s on the land now - there’s no telling what could be lurking in the waters.

While digging around for more treasures, Richie hits the motherload; he finds a compatible charger for their phones. 

Beverly hugs him tightly, kisses his face, and Richie takes a victory swig from his wine bottle to celebrate before allowing Eddie to charge his first. 

Eddie asks why he ought to go first when Richie is the one that found it, and Richie simply answers that his wife might still be somewhere where she can access her phone, and any possible service, and that Eddie’s phone, for that reason alone, ‘is top priority. Easy.’ 

Eddie can’t really find a proper way of thanking Richie enough for the gesture. 

Then, out of kindness, maybe, Richie allows Beverly to charge next, and by the darkest hours just past midnight, Richie gets his turn.

They’re warming up around the fire, Eddie staring worriedly at his unresponsive phone, still eating an overstuffed bowl of rice and veggies, and Beverly with her swollen ankle elevated on a pillow, trying to see if she can somehow convince the internet router to work if she verbally abuses it enough when Richie’s phone buzzes.

The whole house is so quiet, the buzz is almost violent in the silence.

They all stare wide-eyed at it until Richie picks it up, and nervously announces, “it’s a text from before the service went down.”

“How do you know?” Beverly asks, stunned.

“Because it’s from Bill.”


End file.
